February 9, 1999: Leave Us Out of Your Doomsday Scenarios

It all seems quaint now, but at one time people were convinced that when the clock went from 11:59 PM December 31, 1999 to 12:00 AM January 31, 2000, society as most of us know it would be in serious trouble. The reason: many computers weren't Y2K compliant.

The scenarios ranged from merely annoying-power outages and phone interruptions- to a de facto apocalypse with complete societal breakdown as the centerpiece. The source of the problem resided in the code that many computers used. Programmers had saved a few bytes of memory by abbreviating the year with two numbers instead of the more encompassing four digits.

PC owners that were unafraid of the doomsday scenario still worried about their spreadsheet programs and startup disks, while Mac users got a chance to gloat. Sure, Apple had known that the Mac line was Y2K compliant for years but they drove the point home in an SEC filing this week in 1999.